A Stormy Dawn Washes The Sky In Preparation For Another Day

Questions for the end of a summer night when the release from sleep means that life goes on, an occasion of such subtle personal celebration as to disguise itself in reluctance:

Where did we go last night when consciousness flew off like a flock of satiated bats?

Where is that place of timelessness and darkness that we enter through the mysterious portals of sleep?

How do we explain the circadian metamorphose of dreams issuing like butterflies from the inert larvae that slumber makes of us?

Something shuffled across the roof while the darkness still prevailed, something going through the tail end of night with purposeful, scratching footsteps: A raccoon to sleep away the day in a chimney flue? A squirrel eager to get to the front-yard hickory tree and its extravagant crop of nuts? The troll-like keeper of dreams gathering up remnants for recycling?

Even then it starts, in the very first stages of awakening, when the senses are too muddied to deal with the eternal flow of uncertainties. Then, even as embryo, the day begins its teasing of the intellect, its baiting of the ego, its demands for analysis and assessment. But the only safe call is that the Earth continues to spin, setting the cycles and recruiting the allegiance of every finite particle with its eternal whirling. Everything else is subject to the whims of the natural community and to the absurdity of interpretation.

One morning a storm came with the daylight, cracking its lightning whips against the windows and stomping its thundering feet through the backyards. The rain beat down out of the tumultuous wind in a noisy cascade, as if it celebrated escape; and in the elemental turbulence of it there was a sense that something beyond comprehension was loose on the land, perhaps some force from the bottomless mystery of sleep, a marauding nightmare somehow out of its medium and out of control.

Rain swept over the big oak in back of the house in green quivering spasms, rinsing the night shadows out of the tree`s serrated leaves and accentuating the creases in its alligator hide. Before the buffeting of the storm, the oak became a dark, dancing thing, wild and bowing, possessed suddenly with strange rudimentary energy, like an entity from the nether world of tenebrous dreams.

Had there been some mysterious collapse of physiological barriers? Was it simply the ravages of an early-morning storm sweeping over the neighborhood in that transitory time of awakening, or had something escaped from the darkness we enter each night as alone as feral cats? Was there to be now in consciousness the impotence of sleep when there is no control and the raging of the alien and the bizarre assaults us until we cry and whine in our insensibility like blind kittens?

This thing-this electrical storm that might be a fugitive force from somnolence, moved off toward the east with thunderous growling. Its echoes died like the snarling and barking of great hounds in hot pursuit of something huge and tormented. And then it was gone, leaving in its wake a swirl of gray mist and the drip, drip, drip of water bleeding back into the Earth to the cardiac pull of gravity.

In the lifting of the grayness, birds left their cowering and claimed the morning. They came out of the shadows like the flotsam and jetsam of the storm, to twitter and flutter and preen.

There was nothing to do but join them, to engage the storm-washed summer day, and hope that it had only been a slumber-induced illusion that something had crossed over from the valley of sleep and we might now actually have to live with our outrageous nightmares and our ludicrous dreams.